Entertainment

Google Blog Search Gets Faster, More Accurate

One of the many tools in Google's toolbox is Google Blog Search, a service that isn't hyped very much, but still powerful enough to steal the wind from (once almighty) Technorati's sails. However, the results it delivers weren't always that great; often, you'd get old results; sometimes, you'd get irrelevant ones.

According to Search Engine Land, Google addressed both issues in a silent update that rolled out yesterday.

Head of the search quality group in Google’s New York office, Jeremy Hylton, explains that the change in the algorithm has primarily affected the clusters that appear on Blog Search's front page. “We’re doing a better job of choosing the blog posts to include in clusters. We’re also working on changes to expand the number of posts we consider for clustering," he says.

Furthermore, Blog Search is now processing new links much faster. "The post that breaks a story and gets a lot of links is more likely to become the lead story," Hylton says. This is similar to the approach of sites such as Techmeme and TechFuga, although it should be noted that a pure algorithmic approach takes a back seat to a combination of algorithm-based cluster creation and human editing, which is exactly what Techmeme has done in their latest major update.

Google has been trying to beat these memetrackers at their own game for quite a while now, but they never managed quite managed to perfect the algorithm, and thus the results were mixed. It'll be interesting to see if these latest changes will turn Blog Search into the news-bringing powerhouse it could be. It's also important to note that Google's focus on delivering results very fast shows they're taking the Twitter real-time search threat very seriously.

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